Come join us in welcoming Megan Fernandes to Twenty Stories as she reads from her new poetry collection I Do Everything I’m Told, out June 20th via Tin House Books! Joining Megan will be poet Edgar Kunz reading from his new collection Fixer (Ecco/HarperCollins 2023), as well as poets Oliver de la Paz and Mary-Kim Arnold reading selected works. This event is free and open to all!
ABOUT I DO EVERYTHING I’M TOLD
Restless, contradictory, and witty, Megan Fernandes' I Do Everything I'm Told explores disobedience and worship, longing and possessiveness, and nights of wandering cities. Its poems span thousands of miles, as a masterful crown of sonnets starts in Shanghai, then moves through Brooklyn, Los Angeles, Lisbon, Palermo, Paris, and Philadelphia--with a speaker who travels solo, adventures with strangers, struggles with the parameters of sexuality, and speculates on desire.
Across four sections, poems navigate the terrain of queer, normative, and ambiguous intimacies with a frank intelligence: "It's better to be illegible, sometimes. Then they can't govern you." Strangers, ancestors, priests, ghosts, the inner child, sisters, misfit raccoons, Rimbaud, and Rilke populate the pages. Beloveds are unnamed, and unrealized desires are grieved as actual losses. The poems are grounded in real cities, but also in a surrealist past or an impossible future, in cliché love stories made weird, in ordinary routines made divine, and in the cosmos itself, sitting on Saturn's rings looking back at Earth. When things go wrong, Fernandes treats loss with a sacred irreverence: "Contradictions are a sign we are from god. We fall. We don't always get to ask why."
ABOUT MEGAN FERNANDES
Megan Fernandes is a writer living in NYC. She was born in Canada and raised in the Philadelphia area. Her family are East African Goans.
Fernandes has work published The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, Tin House, Ploughshares, Chicago Review, Boston Review, Rattle, PANK, The Common, Guernica, the Academy of American Poets, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, among others.
Her most recent book of poetry, Good Boys, was a finalist for the Kundiman Book Prize, the Saturnalia Book Prize, the Paterson Poetry Prize, and was published with Tin House Books in February 2020. Her next book of poetry, I Do Everything I’m Told, will be published by Tin House in summer 2023.
Fernandes is an Associate Professor of English and the Writer-in-Residence at Lafayette College where she teaches courses on poetry, creative nonfiction, and critical theory. She holds a PhD in English from the University of California, Santa Barbara and an MFA in poetry from Boston University.
ABOUT FIXER
From the author of the award-winning Tap Out, Edgar Kunz's second poetry collection propels the reader across the shifting terrain of late-capitalist America.
Temp jobs, conspiracy theories, squatters, talk therapy, urban gardening, the robot revolution: this collection fixes its eye on the strangeness of labor, through poems that are searching, keen, and wry. The virtuosic central sequence explores the untimely death of the poet's estranged father, a handyman and addict, and the brothers left to sort through the detritus of a life long lost to them. Through lyrical, darkly humorous vignettes, Kunz asks what it costs to build a home and a love that not only lasts but sustains.
ABOUT EDGAR KUNZ
Edgar Kunz is the author of the poetry collections Fixer (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2023) and Tap Out (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2019), a New York Times New & Noteworthy pick. He has been a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, a MacDowell Fellow, a Teaching Fellow at Vanderbilt University, and a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. New poems appear in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, POETRY, American Poetry Review, and Oxford American. He lives in Baltimore and teaches at Goucher College.
ABOUT OLIVER DE LA PAZ
Oliver de la Paz is the Poet Laureate of Worcester, MA for 2023-2025. He is the author and editor of seven books: Names Above Houses, Furious Lullaby, Requiem for the Orchard, Post Subject: A Fable, and The Boy in the Labyrinth, a finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award in Poetry. His newest work, The Diaspora Sonnets, is published by Liveright Press (2023). With Stacey Lynn Brown he co-edited A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry. Oliver serves as the co-chair of the Kundiman advisory board. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Poetry, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. He has received grants from the NEA, NYFA, the Artist’s Trust, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and has been awarded multiple Pushcart Prizes. He teaches at the College of the Holy Cross and in the Low-Residency MFA Program at PLU.
ABOUT MARY-KIM ARNOLD
Mary-Kim Arnold is a writer, artist, and educator. She currently serves as Assistant Dean for Equity & Inclusion in Teaching & Learning at Vermont College of Fine Arts. She is the author of The Fish & The Dove (Noemi Press) and Litany for the Long Moment (Essay Press). Other writings have appeared in Hyperallergic, Conjunctions, The Denver Quarterly, The Georgia Review, and elsewhere.
Mary-Kim has received several fellowships and awards, including the 2020 Howard Foundation Fellowship, the 2018 MacColl Johnson Fellowship, and the 2017 Fellowship in Fiction from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. She serves as Senior Editor for Collaborative & Cross-Disciplinary Texts at Tupelo Quarterly. In 2021, she was appointed by the Governor to serve on the Board of the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. She also serves on the Board of the Providence Athenaeum.
Adopted from Korea and raised in New York, Mary-Kim lives in Rhode Island with her husband and children.